As North Korea Blusters, South Flirts With Talk of Nuclear Arms

Source: NY Times

SEOUL, South Korea — As their country prospered, South Koreans have largely shrugged off the constant threat of a North Korean attack. But breakthroughs in the North’s missile and nuclear programs and fiery threats of war have heightened fears in the South that even small miscalculations by the new and untested leaders of each country could have disastrous consequences.

Now this new sense of vulnerability is causing some influential South Koreans to break a decades-old taboo by openly calling for the South to develop its own nuclear arsenal, a move that would raise the stakes in what is already one of the world’s most militarized regions.

While few here think this will happen anytime soon, two recent opinion polls show that two-thirds of South Koreans support the idea posed by a small but growing number of politicians and columnists — a reflection, analysts say, of hardening attitudes since North Korea’s Feb. 12 underground nuclear test, its third since 2006.

“The third nuclear test was for South Korea what the Cuban missile crisis was for the U.S.,” said Han Yong-sup, a professor of security policy at the Korea National Defense University in Seoul. “It has made the North Korean threat seem very close and very real.”

1. The South doesn't need a nuclear arsenal

Any nuclear attack by the North will be answered by the United States - an arsenal in the South won't make a difference. I wonder if at some stage, the South will get fed up of the North Korean threats and harassment and bomb them to oblivion.

3. How do you know American

nuclear weapons are not already in the South? The United States refused not to have nuclear weapons placed on the South Korean Peninsula and North Korean and this allegedly prompted North Korea to start their own nuclear program. China does not want either to have them but they also sought their own nuclear program to check the threat of the United States. I see it as an escalation on all sides. The North's communist government does not trust China to protect them and now the South may have the same doubts about the U.S. All of this stems from competing political ideologies. The populists of both countries are only pawns of this because the whole peninsula was once a country called Korea. So you have families on different sides. Their repatriation has taken a back seat.